Alaskan Haida’s BC / Aboriginal Jargon traces

Alaskan Haida retains quite a few indications of contact with Chinook Jargon, and they connect it directly with British Columbia.

In the data-heavy list that follows, I’ve left out several times more words that are obvious loans, mostly of more recent borrowing straight from English, such as ‘ulcer’, ‘pain killer’, ‘velvet’.

Rules for making today’s list:

I tend to view as Chinuk Wawa any Haida borrowings of originally-English words that

retain a plural -s,

but are glossed in the singular in this dictionary,

and are known as Jargon in other regions.

I’m also including items that are partially or completely built from native Haida parts, but parallel in structure and metapors to Chinuk Wawa expressions. That is, calques, a.k.a. loan translations.

There are important strands to point out in today’s word list:

1. A minor pattern among some multi-syllable Jargon words up there in the north coast languages, including Haida: some words deviate from the old Jargon tendency towards stressing the first syllable, towards stressing the last syllable instead. I have mused previously that Tlingit must have played a big role in diffusing Chinuk Wawa knowledge around the north coast — maybe this stress pattern correlates with a Lingít tone pattern? At any rate it’s not known to us from CW dialects farther south, nor from the CW of White speakers.

2. Another quite solid pattern is that a number of the words below are mainly known as BC Coast Chinook Jargon. So Haida’s CJ borrowings place Haida speakers within that ‘dialect area’.

3. One more important quality of the Jargon you’re about to see is that it preserves a definitely Indigenous structure.

Only by having learned Jargon from other Native people could Haidas have learned and held onto such details as the popping “ejective” sounds symbolized by the apostrophes, and the back-of-the-mouth “uvulars” symbolized by the underlined letters in k‘aláaxan ‘fence’, t’luxt’lux ‘oyster’, and ts’agts’ag ‘wagon’.

Similarly, certain sound changes in the words below (like the “N” in “China” becoming an “L”; the “B” of “Boston” becoming a “W”) are typical only of Native speech.

And at least one expression here, Waahúu ‘Hawaii’, seems to be undocumented in the speech of anyone but Indigenous people, as you’ll see.)

(“3.b.” I suspect that also the “short A” in janúug ‘Chinook’, jagáns ‘chicken’, ts’agts’ag ‘wagon’, etc., reflecting a “schwa” sound, is also due to Haidas hearing Jargon from Native-phonology speakers. The Haida language, with its “short I” sound, is perfectly capable of saying these words with the “I” that we’re used to hearing, as *jinúug, *jigíns, *ts’igts’ig. So there has to be some good reason for the switch to “A”.)

I think these facts tell us northern Indians were talking Chinuk Wawa to each other, as much as to Whites.

Putting all of that together, let me drive the point home —

I often say on this site that the Jargon lost many words and other nuances, each time it was suddenly taken to a new region. But one thing not thrown overboard in traveling to Haida Gwaii was these distinctive Indigenous sounds. Whites had trouble pronouncing these right, so it’s easy to spot White-influenced Jargon by its simpler pronunciation. I infer that it wasn’t contact with suddenly arrived White gold seekers, or even their jobs aboard the sealing ships with their mixed Native and White crews, that moved Haidas to finally learn Jargon. (Recall that they had used a Haida-based pidgin with sea-otter traders decades earlier, circa 1840, but it soon died out with that trade.)

Instead, I’d bet Haidas picked up CW mainly during their known frequent visits to Victoria, BC, where a widely varied sampling of Aboriginal people clustered in one particular part of town in the later 1800s. Chinuk Wawa is known to have flourished in that Native quarter. Haidas are documented among the creators and singers of the many Jargon songs composed in that section of Biktoli.

Read, think, learn…

Note: modern written Haida’s b, d, g, Garen’t really “voiced” stops as in English, but instead “unaspirated”, so they sound more like p, t, k, q respectively.

bihhíns ‘bean’ — compare Grand Ronde labíns; here the word ‘beans’ has been turned into 2 syllables, with a final stress that may match the pattern I noted above.

cháaj náay ‘church building’ — cp. other BC Indigenous languages and place names, including the Homalco village of Church House, which is likely to have originally been Chinook Jargon!

cháalamaan ‘Chinese people’ (also used in old compounds for a kind of large bottle and for jeans) — cp. < Shaina man > in Kamloops Chinuk Wawa.

cháaliis ‘cherries’ — cp. chə́lis

dáalaa ‘dollar, money, silver’ — cp. dála

dáalaa in’wáay ‘half-dollar, fifty cent piece’ -cp. sítkam-dála

dáalaa náay ‘bank’ (dollar house) — cp. the many expressions that literally mean ‘dollar-house’ in BC & WA languages, strongly implying that Jargon said *dála-háws — and note that a potential synonym, *chíkʰəmin-háws (money/metal-house), seems as if it would mean ‘blacksmith shop‘ in the Grand Ronde area

sándii[-]gaa ‘week’ — not sure what the -gaa is in Haida, but cp. sánti ‘Sunday; week’

sándii[-]gaa[-]y ‘Sunday’ — see the preceding entry; this is the Definite Article form of the noun

sdáagins ‘stockings’ — cp. stákin

sdíimbood ‘steamboat’ — cp. stín-pút

Sdlagw Tlúu[-]s ‘The Otter (Hudsons Bay Company steamer from the 19th century)’ (otter boat[-]?) — I’m including this here more for its historical value as a name for a vessel known to be connected with Chinuk Wawa use; it seems to reflect a Haida translation from English

tla híiluu ‘to use up, deplete, waste O’ — I don’t know what the tla is (it looks sorta Completive or Perfective in many entries), but híiluu is defined in the Alaskan dictionary as a verb (varying with yíiluu, which is remarkably like Kamloops Chinuk Wawa’s normal < ilo >!) meaning ‘to vanish, pass out of existence, become all gone, used up, depleted’ — cp. híluin CW, which is believed to be the one Jargon word from Haida

Waahúu ‘Hawaii’ (from “Oahu”) — cp. wahúʔ ‘Hawaiian’ in Okanagan-Colville Salish (not in Mattina’s dictionary, but pointed out in M’s dissertation by Wilfried Schuhmacher, who happened to attend a lecture on Chinuk Wawa that I gave in Alaska…small world…and note that finding this word 1,000 miles away in Haida tends to shoot down this criticism of Schuhmacher!)

My hypothesis is that the non-aspiration in many (most) of these words just reflects Haida pronunciation habits. In a multilingual First Nations environment such as Victoria, with plenty of Salish and Nuuchahnulth linguistic presence, aspiration would’ve been pretty unimportant compared with ejectivity. So I’d guess the Haidas are to be credited with this pronunciation detail.